Explorations: Books 21-24

This compilation of Books 21-24 of the Explorations series contains the first four books of the tale of Victorian Emily, fantasy-Emily's great-great-grandmother, as revealed in the mysterious notebooks passed down to her by her mother. As they read those notebooks, Emily and Charles realize that they may have a much closer relationship than they ever imagined to Prophettown, the polygamous pseudoreligious BDSM community of Books 8-16, to which Emily's best friend Sarah has been recruited as a submissive bride.

Emily, Victorian Bride: The 21st book of Explorations takes the series in a startling new direction. Real Emily, to escape from the fantasies about Sarah that have been tormenting her, has her avatar fantasy-Emily receive a manuscript written by her great-great-grandmother and namesake, Emily Orn. That manuscript tells an astonishing story: Emily Orn and her husband Edmund Wilkes were part of a "Great Drama" of Dominance and submission in Victorian England, and the first part of Emily Orn's "Bride's Tale" narrates the beginning of her initiation into that drama at the hands of Mrs. Smith, whose establishment has the mission of preparing submissive brides for their wedding-nights.

Emily in the School for Wives: The 22nd book of Explorations continues the story of fantasy-Emily reading her great-great-grandmother's introduction to a world of Victorian BDSM, at the hands of the able Mrs. Smith, trainer of young brides. Victorian Emily finds herself caught in a web of consent and compulsion, forced to undress in an elegant parlor and to hear hints of things to come that seem to her so shameful and degrading that she can hardly believe them.

Emily Undressed: In the 23rd book of Explorations, Victorian Emily's instruction as a submissive bride continues, as modern-day fantasy-Emily can't stop reading, one-handed, the old notebooks she's been hiding from her husband Charles. Unfortunately for fantasy-Emily's backside, though, Charles is about to come home. . .

Emily's Bath: In the 24th book of Explorations, fantasy-Emily's punishment at the hands of her husband Charles continues in the modern story, while in the Victorian notebook of Emily's great-great-grandmother, Victorian Emily is prepared by Mrs. Smith to wear the very special undergarment her bridegroom has chosen for her.

These books of Explorations contain fiction elaborating the following sorts of fantasy that you may wish to avoid: Mf, MMf, Ff, FFFf, ff, a**l, spanking, watersports, ageplay. It's intended for over-18 audiences who, like me, are interested in exploring the lines between pleasure and pain, dominance and submission, and fantasy and reality. All characters depicted are consenting adults.

The Explorations series is a unique take on BDSM above all because of the strong individual voice of Emily Tilton herself, manifestly shaping the fantasy-elaborations of the series. Because Emily is interested in helping herself and others understand how BDSM can be lived within a mostly vanilla existence, the way most of us have to live it, Explorations has a unique element that Emily hopes will set it apart and make it useful: Emily has created a fantasy-version of herself (keeping to the tropes of the genre she knows so well, fantasy-Emily is an eighteen-year-old virginal bride with a self-abuse "problem"), whose fantasies and "realities" are the central subject of the stories of Explorations--but the real Emily also keeps her authorial, real voice in the margins, explaining and analyzing, and revealing from time to time the much more mundane, real version of the things Emily has transformed in the story of her fantasy-self. This doubling of the "I" in the first-person narrative of Explorations makes the series worth exploring all on its own. Come for the hot D/s, spanking, anal action. Stay for the exploration.